How the Show Goes On: Using the Aesthetic Experience of Collective Performance to Adapt while Coordinating

Abstract

Coordinating in action groups consists of continuously adapting behaviors in response to fluctuating conditions, ideally with limited disruption to a group’s collective performance. Through an 18-month ethnography of how members of a community choir maintained beautiful, ongoing performance, I explored how they continuously adapted their coordinating, starting when they felt that their collective performance was fragmented or falling apart. The process model I developed shows that this aesthetic experience—the sense of fragmentation based on inputs from the bodily senses—leads to emotional triggering, meaning group members’ emotions prompt changes in their attention and behavior. They then distribute their attention in new ways, increasing their focus on both global qualities of their ongoing performance (in this context, the musical score and conductor) and local qualities (singers’ contributions). My findings suggest that by changing what aspects of a situation compose their immediate experience, action group members can adapt their coordinating behaviors by changing their heed: the behavior that demonstrates their attentiveness and awareness. The intertwining of attention and emotions helps explain how groups move between heedless and heedful interrelating over time, leading to an aesthetic experience of collective performance as being whole or coherent. My research shows that embodied forms of cognition (what we know from direct experience of an environment) complement accounts of how representational forms of knowledge (what we know from symbols, concepts, or ideas) facilitate real-time adaptation in groups. These insights have implications for a range of organizations engaged in complex action group work.